[The following was copied and pasted from GPT-4 after I fed it a transcript of a 3 minute ramble I had recorded while walking just now and asked it to turn it into a 500 word blog in the style of Morgan Housel]

Title: Cut Costs, Style Freedom: A Tale of Shifting Perspectives, Sustainability, and the Art of Maintenance

Hey there, friends. It's a sunny day, and I've got an unusual, yet compelling subject to share: my journey with home haircuts and its strange parallel to life and investing. Yes, you heard it right. Cutting hair, for me, is much more than a personal grooming ritual; it's a lifelong journey that unveils a myriad of lessons about savings, freedom, and the art of maintenance.

Ever since I was 18, I've been my barber. Simple math shows that I've saved over $5,100 across 18 years, assuming a $20 haircut once a month. What began as a quest to save a few bucks, over time, morphed into something more profound. I realized the autonomy it offered me - the ability to style my hair as I pleased, anytime, anywhere - was the real wealth I was accruing. A 'do to match my beard? Easy. A different vibe for a spontaneous night out? Done. All without a salon appointment or an insistent stylist.

Now, as I journey through life, my hair, like most men's, has decided to take a different path. Thinning, receding, going AWOL in places. But the beauty of self-styling is that you adapt, tweak, and evolve. Buzz it a bit more often, keep it short, throw in a nice tan – it's the spirit of resilience and embracing change.

And here comes the most important part of the journey - the blade saga. Over the years, I've owned four pairs of hair clippers, each ranging from $25 to $50. The first three pairs died on me after a few years. It was frustrating but seemed inevitable - or so I thought. Until one day, I saw these glaring words on my fourth pair of clippers: "KEEP BLADES OILED." In a moment of revelation, I followed that simple instruction and, voila, eight years on, they are still going strong!

Here's where the metaphor gets real. This one minor act, oiling the blades, extended the life of my clippers exponentially. It's akin to how an investment grows over time, given the right care and attention. Just like regular oiling keeps the clippers running smooth, regular contributions and prudent decisions keep your investment growing. Ignore the advice, skip the small maintenance steps, and you end up spending more than necessary, not unlike my three dead pairs of clippers.

In the grand scheme of things, it isn't just about the money saved or the autonomy over my hairstyle. It's about an overarching philosophy of life - sustainability, adaptability, and the profound wisdom hidden in the seemingly mundane. As I draw this parallel between my home haircuts and life, I want to leave you with a thought that I've shared with my students: "Keep the blades oiled." Take care of your tools, investments, relationships – the things you cherish and rely upon – because more often than not, maintenance is the key to lasting value. 

So, whether it's your haircut, your career, or your life savings, remember to keep those metaphorical blades well oiled. That's what keeps things running smoothly for longer. As always, stay curious, friends, and keep discovering those little nuggets of wisdom in your everyday life. Until next time.

[The following was copied and pasted from GPT-4 after I fed it a transcript of a 3 minute ramble I had recorded while walking just now and asked it to turn it into a 500 word blog in the style of Morgan Housel]

Title: Mapping Innovation: An Approach to Harnessing Collective Progress

Hello readers, today let's venture into the vast yet interconnected world of innovation and progress. Our aim? To construct a grand network of ideas spanning diverse industries, inventions, and evolutionary leaps in products. This proposed exercise is not simply an academic endeavor, but a necessary exploration in our quest to comprehend and, eventually, catalyze innovation. 

Envision a vast diagram, a network if you will, where each node represents a specific innovation, a unique idea, or a distinct set of skills. These nodes, tagged meticulously, would be interlinked, reflecting the shared skills, overlapping benefits, and cross-industry applications. This network, in its complexity, would serve as a visual roadmap, leading us to potential progress in seemingly unrelated fields. 

The purpose of such a network is manifold. On one hand, it might inspire fresh connections in our minds, sparking innovation by drawing parallels between distinct fields. Simultaneously, it could offer a different lens through which we perceive existing innovations, enriching our understanding and appreciation of the intricate web of progress.

Indeed, projects of this magnitude could qualify for innovation grants from pioneering organizations like Stripe or visionaries like Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, who have consistently championed the pursuit of understanding progress.

But why is this network critical?

Simply put, it makes the implicit explicit. As a teacher, one of my key goals is to unearth the underlying learning from any experience and explicitly state it. This process is comparable to the 12-steps program in Alcoholics Anonymous, where the first step towards progress is awareness and recognition. 

This process of 'naming' or identifying is critical in the realm of innovation as well. The phenomenon known as Goodhart's Law states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." This underscores the importance of explicitly defining an idea or innovation. Until we give an identity to an idea, until we talk about it openly, it exists in a state of implicit obscurity, a limbo where ideas with great potential may wither away unseen. 

Building this network is akin to naming these ideas. Once we do, we bring them out of the shadows, giving them an identity, making them a part of our collective consciousness. This is the point where true progress happens - when an idea is identified, recognized, and shared for others to build upon. Without this process, we are left grappling in the dark, our hands reaching for ideas that have yet to be named and recognized.

So let's embark on this journey of making the implicit explicit, of connecting the seemingly unconnected, of mapping the landscape of innovation. We might stumble upon unexpected parallels, trigger new thoughts, or simply gain a new perspective on old ideas. Regardless of the outcome, this process of creating a network of innovation is not just an exercise in comprehension, but also a step towards creating a shared language of progress. And who knows? The next big idea might just be a connection away.

[The following was copied and pasted from GPT-4 after I fed it a transcript of a 3 minute ramble I had recorded while walking just now and asked it to turn it into a 500 word blog in the style of Morgan Housel]

Title: Voice to Text: Unleashing Ideas Trapped in the Mind

It seems I've stumbled upon a new method of capturing and nurturing my fleeting thoughts, one that may just revolutionize my approach to idea generation and sharing. This new tool in my arsenal? A humble walk, a recording app, and Google's cutting-edge AI, GPT.

Let me elaborate.

My mind often bustles with thoughts, insights, ideas - fragments of innovation begging to be explored. In the past, I would diligently jot them down in Evernote or Google Drive, bullet point outlines that held the seeds of future blog posts. The intention was always to revisit these thought-germs, to expand them into coherent, engaging stories that I could share with my readers.

Yet, more often than not, these ideas remained confined to their bullet-pointed prisons, unshared, unexplored, unrealized. The connection between conception and fruition seemed to be lost somewhere in my meticulous note-taking and drafting process.

To tackle this, I turned to an unlikely ally: Google's AI. I began recording my thoughts during walks, converting these voice notes to text using Google's transcription services, and pasting this raw, unstructured thought-data into GPT. 

My request to the AI? "Take this and turn it into a 500 word blog post in the style of Morgan Housel." 

If you're unfamiliar with Housel, he's an acclaimed author and blogger who seamlessly blends finance and psychology. His clear, engaging style of storytelling is a masterclass in making complex ideas digestible and, importantly, memorable. Borrowing his writing style might seem ambitious, but remember, our ultimate aim is improvement, and to improve, one must have a model to strive towards.

So, how does this process of idea translation via AI work out?

Interestingly, GPT uses something called "cosine similarity" to decide what comes next. In other words, it measures the cosine of the angle between two vectors in a multi-dimensional space to predict the next word or idea. It's a fascinating melding of linguistics and mathematics.

Is the result perfect? Certainly not. The output is essentially an average of all possible responses based on the AI's estimation of word or idea probabilities. But it is something tangible, a completed work, even if it’s a rough version of what was initially in my mind.

And herein lies the beauty of this process. It bridges the gap between intention and action, between idea and creation. These AI-assisted posts may not be flawless, but they're a significant step up from the dormant bullet points languishing in my digital notes.

This approach has breathed new life into my ideas that were previously resigned to obscurity. I'm unearthing these once-forgotten thoughts and giving them a chance to be seen, read, and perhaps even inspire. I'm taking my implicit ideas, making them explicit, and in the process, creating a trove of thought pieces that, while perhaps not perfect, are undeniably my own.

Because in the end, isn't it better to have something imperfect than nothing at all?

Image Prompt: A robot helping a math teacher with curriculum review

I've had ChatGPT Plus for about 3 months thus far, and I've had a couple spurts of inspiration come and go where I feel like its availability to my curiosity in the moment has been well worth the $60 I've spent on it ($20/month).

• I've gotten some useful R tips and code.
• I've summarized some articles I never got around to reading.
• I've loosely planned multi-stop vacations.
• I've had it explain complex topics to me like I was a 5th grader and create funny analogies.
• I've used it to outline and expand on (and shoot down) some dumb theories I've had.
• I've used it to do some arduous Excel data cleaning and formatting pretty easily.
• Those alone would be worth the $60 thus far on ChatGPT Plus.

But by far I've spent the most time and seen the most value from it helping me with being a math teacher.

Besides thinking of different ways to teach content, coming up with many, many different analogies and real-life examples for the content and skills is a big part of the job for math teachers. Often, the students don't fully understand a topic or skill --EVEN IF they know how to do the math correctly -- until they can relate it to something else outside of classroom - sports, TV/movies, things they've heard about around the dinner table, etc.

They can calculate slope but understand ramps.

They can calculate the roots of a quadratic but understand the flight of a baseball.

They can calculate exponential growth but understand how a virus spreads.

Coming up with many different examples has been very helpful thus far.

The biggest way GPT-4 and various plugins have helped is with lesson plan and curriculum review. Every year I try to do a little revise and review, but mostly this means big picture stuff (curriculum plan, etc.) during the summer and small detail stuff (actual problems in the lesson) during the year, and often the day of or night before. It's that darn procrastination I tell you.

Now with GPT-4 and the Wolfram plugin, I can get many different variations of a math problem instantly. The formatting will make it hard to easily incorporate them into my slides and worksheets but I'll figure that out.

With GPT-4 and the Wolfram plugin, and the prompt below that has been personalized to match the current lesson plan format, I can get lesson plans made for various topics on the spot.

Design an 80-minute Algebra 2 Honors lesson plan on the learning target. The plan should be divided into 5-minute segments and include activities that can be completed on a single sheet of paper. The plan should guide an experienced teacher in introducing the learning goal gradually, and include a list of 5 common student misconceptions. The plan should begin with a review of 3 prerequisite skills, and end with a list of 3 skills that could be learned next. The lesson should start with a 5-minute activity that reviews prerequisite skills, then balance instruction and practice, with practice time being three times instruction time. The lesson should end with a 5-minute summary and a 5-minute formative assessment. The plan should include 3 example problems in each section that align with the learning goal, and 3 assessment problems that could appear on a summative assessment. The total time should be 80 minutes. This lesson’s learning target is: XXX

With GPT-4, I've been able to easily and quickly (albeit roughly) think up a year's worth of curriculum planning for a new subject I'll be teaching in the fall, Statistics & Probability. Obviously I'll lean on previous curricula and established AP/IB topics and pacing, but GPT has been able to explain things in more detail that I'm not familiar with and even is helping me create a week-by-week breakdown. This could have all happened without GPT but it has been much easier and quicker with the help of AI.

More recently, with GPT-4 and the Wolfram + Link Reader plugins, I've been surprised and excited that I could review, summarize, and suggest improvements for my classroom presentation slides! This is a big deal, because even though it won't do a fantastic job, a good enough job is better than anything I could do in the same amount of time. To do so, this was the process I followed:

1. Go to Google Drive and make each presentation shareable with a link

2. Copy the link

3. Paste the link at the end of a customized prompt that reviewed, summarized, and suggested improvements (below)

4. Copy and paste the answers from GPT-4 in a Google Doc

The prompt I used was based on chain-of-thought, self-critique, and expert planning and can be found below. It was good, not great, and can be improved:

Let's go through the presentation linked below together.

First, start by summarizing the key points from the presentation. After that, proceed through the presentation and summarize the main learnings from it. Finally, provide an enticing overall summary, make it compelling for the reader, and suggest ways to improve the presentation.

Second, critique your own summary. Does it accurately reflect the main points of the presentation? Is it compelling enough to make someone want to read the presentation? What improvements can be made to the summary?

Third, imagine how experts in math pedagogy and teaching, like Jo Boaler and Sal Khan, would summarize and critique this linked presentation. What key points would they focus on? What aspects of the presentation might they suggest to improve for better understanding?

Finally, synthesize all of those points above into one coherent and beautiful answer. Then provide your 3 biggest improvements you would make to either the flow of information or to the presentation to improve the student's understanding of the topic and include 3 examples of each of the improvements.

The linked presentation is: XXX

Again, even though these summaries and answers weren't perfect, they were good. And I can work with good.

I took my Google Doc of all the answers and cleaned it up, removing the repeated AI responses, until I had a Doc just of topics covered and improvements suggested per lesson. Most of the improvements were centered around more visual aids and graphics, more interactive tools, and activities that would increase student participation.

Then I used this prompt below and customized it with each lesson's topics and improvements for an expanded list of improvements for the topics that GPT-4 pulled out of the presentation links I fed it. The prompt is:

You are an AI program that is designed to create the world’s most fun, interesting, and informative math lessons for high schoolers. The lessons are not in the exact style of but are similar to Richard Feynman’s famous physics lectures. Above all, these lessons should be relatable to the students' lives so that the students care more about them. 

Imagine a lesson plan that covers these topics:

XXX

and give me at least 20 specific examples or math problems that would make this the world’s best math lesson and are similar to these:

XXX

A lot of the improvements suggested won't be used, but some will. And that's some more than I probably would have updated it with. So, all in all, it was a nice way to get an outsider's perspective on the topics covered and to generate some additional ideas for ways to communicate the learnings and skills.

I plan to review the answers, revise them, and to keep experimenting with different ways of getting better.

GPT-4 is not perfect. But neither am I.

I wanted to continue what has become a yearly tradition in looking at NFL Draft visits by team and position. As I have done in years past, the data was pulled from Walter Football and is current as of April 19, 2023. Visits should be ending soon so this is almost a complete list that is available to the public, as a lot of teams are pretty secretive about their visits getting out. But some beat reporter sleuthing and agent promoting has gotten us to this point.

Similar to last year, I assigned points to each type of visit per prospect (ex. virtual visit just worth 1 point, a private workout worth 3 points) and then tallied the total points across a position. Because while an individual prospect's agent might be more promotional than another's, across the board some patterns should emerge by position.

• Visits worth 1 point = visits where the teams were already there and just talked to a player = Senior Bowl visit, NFL Combine visit, virtual visit
• Visits worth 2 points = visits where the team sought out the player, but in a group setting = Pro Day visit, Local visits (players that grew up or went to college in the area)
• Visits worth 3 points = individual visits where the player was brought in or worked out, often the most important = Private visits (teams have 30 of these to use), Workout visits

(the spreadsheet is conditionally formatted by color by position, so a darker color means that particular team paid more attention to that specific position more than other teams)